Developing a Blockchain-Based Framework for Digital Archiving of BIM Using Axiomatic Design

Building information modeling (BIM) has been attracting increasing attention in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry in recent years. The wide spread of BIM marks the transition from 2D and paper-based archiving to 3D and digital archiving of project information. However, the commonly used centralized managing approaches for BIM data have high risks of data loss and data tampering. With cryptographic algorithms and distributed databases, blockchain has the potential to address the limitations of data loss and trust in conventional BIM management methods. Therefore, this paper proposes a blockchain-based framework for digital archiving of BIM data. In this paper, the axiomatic design approach is utilized to design the archiving framework in order to systematically map the design parameters with the functional requirements and minimize the information contents. The proposed framework contains five modules, including the BIM module, building plan approval (BPA) module, building data simplification (BDS) module, distributed data storage (DDS) module, and digital document verification (DDV) module. Hyperledger Fabric is utilized to develop the blockchain system based on the proposed framework. In the end, a simple BIM model with 240 components and around 11,000 lines of content in the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) file is taken as an illustrative example to validate the proposed blockchain approach. By storing the BIM model on to the developed blockchain, it is found that each transaction of a blockchain can store over 5000 lines of IFC contents with 0.09 s of uploading latency. The results show that the proposed blockchain-based approach can effectively and securely archive BIM data.